NEWS

NEWS

openSUSE Site Hacked

The news.opensuse.org site was hacked this week (https://news.opensuse.org/). Attackers defaced the site and posted the Kurdish flag and a message. The site was isolated from the rest of the openSUSE infrastructure, so critical services like the build, test, and download systems were untouched.

"Our offered downloads remain safe and consistent, and there was no breach of any openSUSE contributor data," openSUSE chairman, Richard Brown told us.

The hacked site runs WordPress, and it appears that the CMS software was not updated, allowing the attackers to exploit a known vulnerability.

The news.opensuse.org site is not managed by the SUSE or openSUSE IT teams but is, instead, administered by a team from SUSE's parent company Micro Focus.

LibreOffice Goes Online with 5.3 Release

The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice version 5.3. The latest version is available for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. This release has many new features, including an experimental ribbon-like interface reminiscent of Microsoft Word.

One of the biggest highlights of the new release is the source code for LibreOffice Online. Users can now install LibreOffice Online on their servers and use file sync and storage services like Nextcloud to create an experience similar to Google Docs and Office 365.

Although the source code is available for download, The Document Foundation has no plans to offer LibreOffice Online as a service. Italo Vignoli, a cofounder of The Document Foundation, told us that the foundation doesn't have the resources to build a Google-like infrastructure to offer such as service. LibreOffice Online is intended for ISPs and private cloud vendors. It also allows organizations and governments to build their own online document services.

Jose Miguel Parrella, Product Manager, Open Source, at Microsoft wrote in a blog post, "Microsoft Azure is the first public cloud provider to offer Clear Linux, and we're really excited about what it means for Linux users in the cloud and the community at large."

According to Parrella, Microsoft is offering a bare-bones virtual machine that can be used by customers to build out a system with bundles of their choice. It offers a container image that includes the popular Docker container run time and a sample solution image for developing machine learning applications preloaded with popular open source tools.

Parrella highlighted the performance of Clear Linux OS and said, "In addition to the performance features of Clear Linux, we believe that DevOps teams will benefit from the stateless capabilities of Clear Linux in Azure. By separating the system defaults and distribution best practices from the user configuration, Clear Linux simplifies maintenance and deployment, which becomes very important as infrastructure scales."

The move is not surprising because one out of three virtual machines in Azure run Linux, and Microsoft wants to ensure that no matter which distribution Azure customers run, it's fully supported on its cloud.